Profile

Shourya Roy is a Senior Research Scientist and Research Manager in Xerox Research Centre India. Shourya is responsible for leading research initiatives in areas pertaining to services innovation with special focus on emerging markets. As a Research Manager of Human Computation competency area, he manages a team of highly qualified team of Scientists with Doctoral degrees from leading institutes in India and abroad. In addition, Shourya looks after identifying and leveraging opportunities for technology partnership with academic institutions and business partners. Shourya's research interest spans Text Mining, Natural Language Processing, application of Machine Learning and Human Computation (a.k.a. Crowdsourcing). Shourya has been one of the initiators and active members of the research community around “Noisy Text Analytics.” Since 2007, he has been co-organizing annual workshops on "Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data" (AND) in top ranked academic conferences and serving as an editor of special issues on “Noisy Text Analytics” of International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR).

Shourya is presently intrigued by the challenges and opportunities that the area of human computation has to offer. Crowdsourcing is "the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call." This is a new mode of organizing work and has been applied to a variety of tasks, from digitization, image labeling, user studies, natural language tasks, machine translation evaluation, Electronic Design Automation (EDA), and so on. Unfortunately, organizations still see it as an interesting way of getting things done but not an integral way. In his present research activities, Shourya is exploring how organizations can make crowdsourcing more effective and thereby become more time and cost efficient. This area of "Enterprise Crowdsourcing" is a highly interdisciplinary one and has several research challenges to offer pertaining to computer science, distributed systems, social science, machine learning, control theory etc.

Shourya has done Masters in Computer Science and Business Administration from IIT Bombay and Faculty of Management Studies respectively. He also has a Bachelor’s degree from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in Computer Science and Engineering. Prior to Xerox, Shourya spent several years in IBM Research working mostly in information and knowledge management, business analytics, text and web mining. Shourya has over thirty publications in reputed conferences and journals as well as been granted (and filed)several patents.